Yojimbo, Mac tool extraordinaire

I recently acquired a program called Yojimbo that has, in a word, made my life much simpler. I think of it as a smart box, or archive, into which I can store all the stuff I collect while stumbling around the Web. That's in contrast to a dumb, inert folder.

Yojimbo is the garage, or attic or basement, that I always needed for my always-expanding collection of Web pages, text clippings, images, bookmarks, and receipts - all the stuff, in other words, that I grab, sometimes with no good reason beyond it's being available to grab. But it's a garage that is self-organizing, constantly ordering and indexing its contents for easy retrieval. Garage with butler included!

In the past, these collected items would get stored willy-nilly in my computer. Some languished in my Mac's Downloads folder, most others just cluttered by desktop. Every so often, I might do some house-cleaning and shuffle items into this folder or that - a Reads, folder, for instance, for storing all those news, magazine, and Web page articles that I fully intended eventually to read, someday, somehow, in the future, when I happened to have the time and actually remembered that they existed. This Reads folder itself was contained in a folder I long ago labled Stuff - a sprawling collection of items, many but not all of them organized in folders: images, documents, bookmarks, MP3 music files, you name it.

Yojimbo is a better Stuff folder, a program-and-container into which it's particularly easy to put things. I can, for example, just ask to print any document or web page I like and, in the usual drop-down menu, select "PDF to Yojimbo". Voila - the item is stored under 'jimbo's control, complete with any tags I may wish to add. Or, I can click on another button in my browser to store a page's URL in YJ. Or, I can hit the F8 button my keyboard and any text or image I have selected will get stored, again with tags. Finally, I can drag items to a 'jimbo tab that sits patiently on the far left edge of my desktop; this action automatically stores the items, too.

When I need to find an item, YoJ is way helpful, too. It provides a spiffy Mac-style interface with a scrolling list of all stored items. This list is easily searched, the items's titles, textual content, and tags all available near-instantly. A preview pane shows selected items but one can also open items in their own windows, print them, or drag them to the desktop as normal files. Clicking a bookmark launches the appropriate page in the default Web browser. In addition, items are organized into categorical folder off to the left - URLs, images, receipts, your choice, etc. - to make finding things easier, too. Smart folders can be created that automatically include items that contain specified keywords. (I haven't used it, yet, but a crypto function can hide chosen items from prying eyes, too.)

That's YoJo in a nutshell - a well-designed program that really does the job. I wish I had had this to use many years ago.